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Saturday, July 2, 2005

UK: Judges who are disciplined for bad behaviour will not have the findings against them made public under a complaints regime to be launched next year.

The decision to treat judges differently to doctors, barristers, solicitors and police officers was announced by the lord chancellor and the lord chief justice 29 June.

The exception, as at present, will be those judges whose misdeeds are trumpeted in the media - for example, those who make racist remarks in open court which are picked up by reporters.

In those cases, it is necessary for the sake of public confidence in the justice system to reveal the outcome of an investigation, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, said.

He disclosed that 250 complaints of misconduct against judges and tribunal chairmen had been investigated by the Department of Constitutional Affairs last year, 68 of which were upheld and resulted in disciplinary action. Eleven were serious enough to be referred to senior judges for investigation.

Judges have been admonished or reprimanded for such behaviour as racist language, sexual harassment, discourtesy in court, delays in delivering judgments and drink driving. One referred in court to "the nigger in the woodpile", while another said that fraud was an offence prevalent among Nigerians.

One who had previously been reprimanded for kissing a court usher had to apologise after saying, in reference to doctors writing sick notes: "I know many people with duodenal ulcers who work like niggers." Yet another was reprimanded for falling asleep twice in a rape trial, causing the hearing to be abandoned.

Circuit judges may be removed by the lord chancellor "on the ground of incapacity or misbehaviour".

This power has only once been exercised, in 1983 after a judge was convicted of smuggling whisky and cigarettes into Britain in his yacht.

From April 2006 a new Office for Judicial Complaints will deal with allegations about judges' personal conduct, though complaints over the way they conduct court proceedings will be outside its remit.

That will be part of a shake-up which will transfer the responsibility for choosing and promoting judges from the lord chancellor to a new Judicial Appointments Commission.

A judicial appointments and conduct ombudsman will be appointed to oversee both the appointments commission and the complaints office.

Candidates for the bench who feel they have been treated unfairly will be able to take their cases to the ombudsman, as will a judge subject to a misconduct complaint or a complainant who feels the investigation has not been properly handled.

Unlike judges in the US and Canada, those in England and Wales will not normally be subjected to public disclosure of the fact that they have been disciplined.

An agreement between the lord chief justice and the lord chancellor, under which they will share responsibility for disciplining judges as part of the new arrangements, says the two "may agree in a particular case that public confidence in the justice system demands that the fact that a judicial office-holder has been subject to disciplinary action, or has been exonerated, be made public".

The lord chief justice, Lord Woolf, said he supported keeping judges' names under wraps: "One has got to take into account the need still for the public to appear before the judge and for him or her to continue to perform his or her job as a judge."

By Clare Dyer posted 2 July 05

Related:

Judges reveal anger over curbs on power!UK: Senior judges fear that a succession of recent laws pushed through by the government could fetter their ability to administer justice and to act as a check on the executive.

Here come de Judge - Time to Leave [266]There have always been examples of rulings and interpretations that have supported the saying "The law is an ass". This is increasingly the case, because even the best intentioned judges are now facing an avalanche of new technologies and social change. But, it is no good making excuses for the judiciary and continuing to accept their strange interpretations. We must recognise that not only judges but the whole legal system will struggle more and more. In the end the whole system will become a farce. This is the way empires end.